Monday, 9 February 2009

website critique: Rhizome

"Rhizome is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. Through open platforms for exchange and collaboration, our website serves to encourage and expand the communities around these practices. Our programs, many of which happen online, include commissions, exhibitions, events, discussion, archives and portfolios. We support artists working at the furthest reaches of technological experimentation as well as those responding to the broader aesthetic and political implications of new tools and media. Our organizational voice draws attention to artists, their work, their perspectives and the complex interrelationships between technology, art and culture."

Please leave comments on what we should learn from this site in terms of developing our own project.

4 comments:

  1. Had a chance to look at the urls from Monday; thoughts as follows:-
    netzspannung - slow loading and too dependant on java applications to make sense of the site. Liked the Rhizome site from the point of view of its structure and ease of navigation around it, not particularly keen on the look of it. walkerart - like its simplicity in aesthetic and functional terms, I wonder how practical it is to have an increasing amount of information in a scroll down section, particularly as our site expands in content and membership. The visualarts part of this site I thought was a good potential model for our 'Portfolio' section. Iniva - particularly liked this site for clean, simple aesthetics and good functionality. Curators in context - grid view of archived contributions - could see this working as a 'Research' section of our site; like the way it randomly regenerates each time the page is uploaded.

    Some urls of sites that I like from the point of view of either aesthetics or functionality/navigability, or both:-

    www.jordanmckenzie.co.uk
    www.john-newling.com/projects
    www.antonygormley.com

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  2. Dear All,

    Here is the draft project plan I put together as a reminder for everyone and just that everyone knows what we are working on. Please feel free to amend the text, ask questions or suggest other things you want to include.

    Project summary:

    "This collaborative project is developing within the Practice and Dissemination / Practice and Documentation modules of MA Fine Arts / MA Performance Courses at York St. John University (YSJ). The collaboration with MA practitioners has been initiated by Judit Bodor, independent curator and consultant, as part of her C4C (Creativity for Collaboration) Fellowship at CETL (Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) at YSJ and is assisted by Roddy Hunter (Head of Fine Art). Bodor's research fellowship investigates how universities/colleges (HEIs) can interact with the public and at the same time promote contemporary art/performance practices of the academic community (http://www2.yorksj.ac.uk/default.asp?Page_ID=5592)

    On one hand (through interviews, questionnaires and desktop research) the research is investigating how physical venues, such as university galleries, operate as platforms of interaction between academic and professional context and will result in a written research report that Bodor offers for the University to evaluate its own institutional engagement with the public and the development of future institutional strategies. On the other hand the research is aiming to develop a strategy (through collaboration with the academic community) in response to the specific situation in York (and at York St John University), where the focus on tourism and heritage industries and the lack of contemporary art galleries (commercial, publicly funded or university) interfere with the development of artistic community and its engagement with the public. This part of the research is collaborative and will result in a website developed together with MA practitioners to experiment with a virtual platform for artists at YSJ to disseminate their practice / research and interact with the wider public. Further to this, the long term aim - and as such the legacy - of this fellowship is to help establishing an artistic community online that will enable its members to engage with other practitioners and wider audiences; develop individual and collaborative projects; assist in professional development and hopefully lead to the future establishment of a physical venue for social interaction. The website is planned to be launched in Autumn 2009 as part of the MA Fine Arts and MA Performance degree show.

    The website has three core function:

    1. Research: vehicle / resource to develop theoretical framework around individual practices
    2. Dissemination: web archive of portfolios (including biographies, links to projects/exhibitions, photos/videos, hyper-linked texts and keywords that on one hand help contextualising individual practices, on the other hand enable further research outside of the website as well as connectedness between practitioners)
    3. Interaction: forum for public discussion / feedback "


    Web brief comments:

    Steve. thanks for comments, I will look at the websites you have suggested, but could you be a bit more specific about the things you like in them? I also have a website that might be interesting to look at: www.livearchives.org
    it is specifically interesting as it works with keywords on the main page and through keywords you get get to the content. Obviously our website would be more visual and the content would be different, I was wondering whether our site could have keywords in the front page and by clicking on those one would see artists' portfolios whose practice / research is connected to that specific keyword?

    Please send us more comments so I can develop a document of how the website should look and function. I will try to write up this document in the weekend and I will incorporate everything you send until Friday. Then on Monday we can look at it together and discuss the details. Next week Roddy and I will present this document (including project plan and web brief) to the Faculty to ask for their support to involve Justin McKeown as our artistic advisor and web designer.

    Judit

    Judit

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  3. Hi Judit,

    Thanks for comments and work done so far - it seems to me that the framework you have outlined fulfills the criteria we have discussed. I think there is an essential tension in this project because it clearly tries to satisfy several needs which may not be entirely compatible with each other - I see something of an incongruity between the desire to have a platform for disseminationg academic research and a 'Gallery' platform for our portfolios of work which may have a more or less populist aesthetic - that could be more a comment on where my own head is, however! Nevertheless I think that a tension of this kind is interesting to work with and around and should test our collective thinking.

    I have looked at the 'livearchives' site - I agree with your views about the use of keywords and think this could be a good way of maintaining a contextual 'spine' or core throughout our site.

    Yeah, apologies for being less than specific about the reasons for directing towards the urls that I posted. To clarify:- John Newling's site is primarily about the way it looks for me, I think - I particularly enjoy the 'type-written-report' aesthetic. It is easy to navigate around - ostensibly having four main pages, the links to which are always present so that there is no need to constantly use the 'back' button when navigating around the site; the bulk of the information - research, documentation of the works etc. is carried in hyperlinks which appear on the right of each page.

    Simplicity is again the key for me in looking at Jordan Mckenzie's site - it successsfully combines research/academic thinkings within an easily accesssible site which is not boring to look at - I guess it kind of addresses, in practice (and arguably to a limited extent) some of my comments above.

    Antony Gormley's site is just a very simple vehicle for finding a way around the artist's work and his thinking - good 'clean' design and easy to navigate around.

    Obviously all of these sites are platforms for single artists who have a varying degree of interest in research and its dissemination, so I'm not thinking that they are necessarily directly applicable to our model, but there are small facets of each which might be a part of our 'bigger picture'.

    Cheers, Steve

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  4. Steve: "Liked the Rhizome site from the point of view of its structure and ease of navigation around it, not particularly keen on the look of it"

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